TL:DR; ATO treats forks as creating a “new asset” causing unexpected tax burdens for any Australian taxpayer holding cryptocurrencies in future. Background I got a nasty surprise when preparing my 2017/2018 tax return. I had sold my Bitcoin Cash as fast as possible, and gotten around to selling other minor forks…

Extended plugin features and dynamic add & remove — Written by Rusty Russell The c-lightning team is proud to announce the v0.7.2 release of c-lightning. This is the first of our new “every two months” timed releases, and it has improvements across the board. This is a recommended upgrade! Plugin improvements: External contributor Antoine Poinsot contributed dynamic plugins: this…

Fears over the declining block reward are real. — I hypothesize several hundred billion, in present value USD, would be an adequate security budget — Dan Held, https://blog.picks.co/bitcoins-security-is-fine-93391d9b61a8 Dan dismisses concerns about Bitcoin’s security once we transition to fees; he’s wrong. [Note: Dan claims I misread maliciously, and that is an annual budget, hence I have fixed up below.]

My mainnet node sees 23304 unique channels (technically 45958 half-channels) from 2902 nodes; mean capacity is 0.027 BTC ($US92), median is 0.005 BTC ($17). Mean fee is 960 millisatoshis + 190 parts-per-million, median is 1000 millisatoshis+ 1 ppm. (I trimmed outliers, and rounded). This shows that most people are running with the (lnd/c-lightning) default fee settings:

I’ve had this idea for a while, but I’ve never got around to it so I’m calling publicly for collaborators: https://github.com/rustyrussell/million-channels-project The project would be in several parts: Do some rough analysis of the current lightning network: number of (public) channels, number of nodes, distribution of channels by node, and…

Last week I had the honor of hosting the key Lightning developers in my hometown of Adelaide, Australia. I put this article on yalls.org …

It’s natural to make simplifying assumptions about technology; such abstractions let us build on top without dealing with exponentially increasing complexity. But it’s worth revisiting our assumptions occasionally, particularly when they’re yet to be proven. Is It Sufficient? Bitcoin works by nodes validating transactions (economic actors), and tie-breaks between valid alternatives being provided…

I work on Bitcoin (currently: Lightning Network), continuing a 20 year career of Free/Open Source Software development. I love the developers and the project, but sometimes I despair of the environment. I wrote rant which my more level-headed colleagues advised me not to post, but this issue is one I…

“Be excellent to each other please!” — Lightning-dev mailing list welcome message Two and a half years ago I read a paper which, once I finally understood it, opened my eyes to what bitcoin could be. …